It’s Thanksgiving week in the U.S., which means an abundance of new films. We take a look at Allied, Rules Don’t Apply and Bad Santa 2,
Allied K (out of 4) Starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris and Simon McBurney. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Opens Wednesday at major theatres. 124 minutes. 14A
Director Robert Zemeckis is always efficient, but rarely empathetic.
He’s an absolute whiz at setting up computer-generated action — the skyscraper tightrope scenes of last year’s The Walk required vertigo warnings — and he knows how to push buttons for thrills and suspense.
What he’s less adept at, a clear disadvantage for his World War II love story Allied, is creating credible romantic drama.
He has two of the world’s top actors, Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, in a story that references the selfless her- oism of Casablanca, where amour burned for the greater good. Zemeckis is unable to generate enough heat with Pitt and Cottillard to bring more than a warm glow to the proceedings.
Capably scripted by Steven Knight ( Locke), Allied is more like Casablanca by way of a Mission: Impossible movie, a combination the M: I series already tried, more successfully, with last year’s Rogue Nation.
Pitt’s Canadian flyboy Max Vatan, first seen as he parachutes into the Moroccan desert, is a spy working behind enemy lines in the Nazi-controlled North Africa of 1942.
He teams up with Cotillard’s Marianne Beauséjour, a French Resistance fighter whom he meets in Casablanca.
Their mission, should they decide to accept it, is to rub out the German ambassador and his stooges at a fancy dress ball, where the assassins are unlikely to survive. The two are supposed to pretend they’re married, which is easy to do physically — there’s a steamy desert sex scene — but harder when emotions get involved, as they inevitably do.
Love ensues despite warnings from commanding officers — Jared Harris and Simon McBurney make for excellent killjoys. An involving plot twist, already revealed by a TMI trailer, considerably ups the intrigue and threatens the romance.
The picture never quite rises to the challenge of these complications, despite superb production design and costuming that give it a sheen worthy of The English Patient, yet another film reference.
Pitt and Cotillard aren’t convincing as a couple, although she tries harder than he does.
They’re lost amidst the sandstorms and plane crashes that Zemeckis is so good at conjuring.